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COURSE SHARE BY ACADEUM
Online Course Marketplace for Higher Education
UX Design · Design Systems · UI Design · Accessibility · Brand Identity
Project Overview
Helping Colleges Expand Student Access Through a Course Marketplace
Course Share is a product that helps colleges grow revenue and improve student retention by offering online courses from partner institutions. As the Visual Design Lead for Acadeum, I redesigned the company’s brand, established a cohesive design system for their product, designed a new integrated student experience, and led the redesign of their existing educator experience.
Educator Experience
A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO REVITALIZING THE EXPERIENCE AND ALIGNING IT WITH EVOLVING WORKFLOWS
Following the successful launch of the student experience, we shifted focus to the Educator Platform, the primary tool institutional staff use to manage course-enrollment logistics.
Rather than treating this as a simple UI refresh, my product manager and I developed a phased strategy to holistically reassess the platform. Our plan focused on identifying friction points, evaluating feature effectiveness, and progressively redesigning the experience to improve usability, ensure consistency, and better support evolving institutional workflows.
Clarifying Goals Through Analysis
With research findings in hand, we mapped out user journeys and documented Jobs to Be Done for our primary user roles. These artifacts helped us connect institutional goals with platform touchpoints, highlighting where we could reduce friction and improve alignment.
Results
The redesigned experience was released as a single coordinated launch, updating the entire platform to align with our new brand, design system and the strategic structural changes.
Early institutional cohorts responded positively to the new interface, and the rollout was designed to prioritize ongoing iteration, allowing the team to refine features as usage data and qualitative feedback from institutional outreach surfaced in real time.
Now serving over 500 colleges and universities, the updated Educator Experience improves clarity, streamlines high-frequency workflows, and strengthens cohesion across Course Share's ecosystem of tools.
Before
After
We used this analysis phase to plan the redesign work. We broke the platform into thematically linked sections, prioritizing by impact and feasibility. Our roadmap allowed us to work systematically while staying aligned with product milestones.
500+ Active Institutions
Uncovering Insights Across Teams and Users
We started with internal research, conducting surveys and interviews with departments across support, product, engineering, onboarding, and sales to uncover known friction points. These cross-functional insights helped us frame early hypotheses around key user needs.
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We conducted qualitative and quantitative research: user interviews, behavioral data analysis, and a full audit of the platform’s structure and features. We then mapped the current information architecture to pinpoint structural inefficiencies and user confusion.
This phase helped us identify key pain points and classify features by their value and usage to inform redesign priorities.​
Rapid Prototyping and Technical Alignment
With the flows in place, I collaborated closely with development to validate feasibility and align on technical constraints, while also working with students and advisors to prototype and test early concepts. We explored both mobile and desktop mockups, iterating quickly to refine the core information architecture and user flows. This process helped us prioritize essential functionality, streamline navigation, and build a responsive experience that met user needs across devices.
Results
After launch, the platform drove a significant increase in student enrollments, confirming the strategic value of a student-facing experience and marking a pivotal shift in Acadeum’s business model.
Course Share is used by over 26,000 students supporting them in accessing the courses they need to stay on track for graduation.
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26k+
Active Users
Bridging Ecosystems Through Research and Strategy
The process began with in-depth research into the needs of students and advisors, along with a thorough understanding of the current ecosystem. I mapped out new user flows and the shared advisor-student workflow to align both ends of the experience.
Student Experience
Empowering Students to Take Ownership of Their Academic Path
The product's original functionality was limited to the educator experience, used by institutional staff to select, approve, and manage course enrollments on behalf of students.
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Alongside my product manager and the CTO, I advocated for expanding the platform to students. While this shift from a B2B to a B2B2C model posed risks, we worked to demonstrate the strategic value of this direction by presenting the opportunity to streamline the enrollment process, reduce advisor workload, increase student retention, strengthen institutional engagement, and open new revenue opportunities through expanded platform adoption.
This opened the door for the design of a student-facing experience where learners could browse pre-approved courses, receive advisor-recommended options, and request enrollment directly.
Design System
A foundation for scalable and cohesive design
As part of the rebrand and to support product growth, I created the Acadeum Interaction and Design Guide, a centralized source of truth that ensures visual consistency across the brand’s digital experience.
The system defines core foundations such as typography, color, spacing, and UI components including form fields, dropdowns, filters, cards, buttons, and mobile-specific behaviors. It brought structure to elements like iconography, loading indicators, and error states, establishing clear rules for interaction and layout.
I referenced select UI patterns from the legacy system and strategically improved upon them to create a more modern, scalable design framework.
Built for Inclusion and Long-Term Growth
Accessibility was a core consideration, with attention to color contrast, legible type sizes, and visible visual cues to ensure an inclusive, intuitive experience for all users.
Beyond improving cross-functional collaboration and streamlining design-to-dev handoff, the system laid the foundation for scalable development rooted in consistency, accessibility, and product efficiency.
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Typography
The brand type system combines Europa, a modern sans serif, with Baskerville URW, a serif font optimized for digital readability. This pairing balances modernity with tradition, reflecting Acadeum’s role in advancing academic innovation while honoring its foundations. Together, they support an accessible, legible experience across devices and screen sizes.
Color
The brand’s palette blends vibrant purples with grounded neutral tones. Purple reflects creativity, curiosity, and wisdom, which are qualities that align with innovation, education, and forward-thinking. Black, white, and grey convey professionalism, structure, and clarity, essential traits for building trust and fostering connection.
Branding
A network of knowledge
The visual identity draws inspiration from the structure of neural networks, systems that process information, recognize patterns, and learn over time. Similarly, Acadeum connects institutions across the country to create a dynamic, data-driven ecosystem for sharing courses and expanding access to education. The brand represents the seamless flow of knowledge, empowering colleges and universities to collaborate in service of student success.
Results
The updated brand identity helped unify Acadeum’s visual presence across touchpoints, reinforcing its position as a forward-thinking leader in academic collaboration. By establishing a clear visual system and meaningful design language, the brand set a strong foundation for the redesign of both the Educator and Student Experiences.
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